User blog:Gojirob/So I get home from work one morning...
Until late 2002, I worked for a Northeastern US electronics chain called Nobody Beats The Wiz. I wasn't always the best salesman, and towards the end, I was transferred to video and music sales, and was finally doing well when the chain hit the skids, a cutthroat market eating yet another chain. This was particularly disappointing since we had dodged that bullet in 1998, being purchased by Cablevision. But the cable giant's reasons for buying us didn't pan out for them, and with a generous package while there and outgoing, I have no cause to complain. Still, it was nine months before my unemployment ended, only beaten by the nineteen months I went through after 2009. No, I didn't suffer either time, except from nerves, knowing, despite certain talking heads, that unemployment runs out--always. Those unemployed who'd rather live off it, that you hear of? To my experience, they are a myth. It runs out, as mine did twice, each time only finding something by pure chance. But I did find something both times, both times security work, and eventually, at good places. But the newbie works the less-than-ideal times. No way around that. At one point in 2003 (At Revlon Research Center in Edison NJ), I sometimes worked the afternoon shift and sometimes the overnight. There was literally no time to recalibrate my sleeping patterns. A veteran guard began to have problems, and while I sympathized and felt a bit like a vulture, I got his solid overnight shift when he left, and hard as overnight can be, at least I could sleep better when I got home. Long story short, I improved myself there and showed I could be relied on, not only getting a daytime shift but being hired directly by the client, instead of being a contractor. But in the midst of this, I learned not to go to sleep immediately after getting home. Better to be up till about noon, and then turn in. On the other hand, this was before DVR's, and not much was on in the morning. I learned my cable company (also once my employer) had an Anime-On-Demand service. I subscribed, and started watching various series. Among them was one I'd never heard of before, featuring a girl, a mutant with deadly powers. She was naked as she escaped, so I imagined she was going tsundere on the guards for seeing her like that. Uh-No. There was a screwball clumsy girl, so I imagined her as a talkative hostage who the killer girl would always yell at to shut up, while eventually becoming BFF's. Oh, Hell No. The two cousins we met seemed, shall we say, overly affectionate, and I saw them being given a lot of weird looks for it. Not really. The guy had a dead little sister, so I thought--OK. Killer girl is his sister, taken away and experimented on. Hard to be further off base than that. Second episode comes, and I see a sweet cute little homeless girl with a puppy even cuter, and I think, well, now I'll stop watching when they die horribly. Thank God I Was Wrong, and I mean that. Cute horned girl is torn apart and dies--not quite. The homeless girl tells her mother about being sexually abused, and---and I still have not gotten over the mother's reaction. Finally, the boy learns the truth of his little sister's death, and decides---that he can't just stop loving someone, even in an unforgivable circumstance. Looking back, maybe it was my fragile, exhausted state of mind while first watching this that hooked Elfen Lied into my mind. I devoured the manga when I found it, and first finished it again during the wee small hours. Now, from 1998 to 2008, I wrote stories for a Star Trek fanzine called Orion Press, till the editor and I hit major disagreements--things happen. Starting with a Voyager drabble in early 2009, I got back into writing my own stories, and wanted to start writing EL fanfic. Problem I found, even devoted sites had spotty info. Having made mistakes in my early fic (like the name of Fox Mulder's sister) I wanted my stuff to be at least series-accurate. I found a Wiki, but while it had the infrastructure, it did not have a lot of info. So I began to work on it... BTW, I work the day-shift again. Category:Blog posts